FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Dear Cambridge and Somerville Constituents —

Just a quick update before we head into the weekend.

Yesterday, Speaker Mariano and House Leader Moran announced they will be moving to make committee votes public when we take up the House Rules in a formal legislative session next week.

This is a big victory for transparency in the legislature!

For years, myself and other progressive colleagues and good government advocates have fought for this reform. As I said to House Leaders when I met with them last month, "there's no way to defend not making all committee votes public information."

This is just one step the House is taking to respond to calls for greater transparency and productivity in the new legislative term.

In addition, under the proposed House Rules, the timeline of the legislative process will be accelerated. Chairs will be required to conduct a poll of the members from their branch of bills that originated in their branch within 60 days of the bill being heard, but Chairs may request an additional 30 days at their discretion. In short, House members will be voting on House bills and Senators on Senate bills. This alone should help alleviate the logjam of bills reported under the current Joint Rule 10.

Another notable item is that attendance at committee hearings will be posted online, along with committee members' individual votes. And, committee staff will be required to produce independent summaries of each bill being heard and post that information as well. The goal is to inform the public what is going on with a bill and when it is going to be released by a Committee, who supported it, and who didn't.

I am also pushing to make committee testimony available online. There are some concerns to navigate with sensitive testimony, such as someone coming to the public service committee about their personal pension or a victim of violent crime who shares a traumatic story with the judiciary committee, etc. So, there is now talk about allowing Chairs to do this on an individual basis, or creating a website to make testimony available online.

In general, there are a lot of things in the proposed House rules package that align closely with some of the recent Senate proposals. There is real hope that for the first time since 2019, the House and Senate will come to an agreement on Joint Rules.

For my part, I will continue standing up for transparency and good government in the legislature. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns on this or any other matter.

Yours in service,

Mike